First thing I do with a legacy code base is to commit it to git, then pass it through pep8 and pylint to get a sense of its level of dirtyness, then run autopep

First thing I do with a legacy code base is to commit it to git, then pass it through pep8 and pylint to get a sense of its level of dirtyness, then run autopep8 to fix all that can be autofixed. Then commit the autofix. Then manually fix the remaining pep8 warnings after muting the ones that are too many. Then run pylint on it. I'll mute some of the most offended violations, and fix the others, so to have pyflakes and pylint run with zero warnings. Then hook the linters in ci, so the dirtyness do not come back through the window. In this process, I may exclude a folder or two if they are non vital and have a lot of dirty files. I think I have fixed code with nearly 10.000 violations this way, it takes 3 hours max if you use an efficient editor. Then the code is is some shape that you can start working on.